The Death of Secrets

This quote comes from Jack Legare, the hero of my thriller in progress. He was talking about Wall Street. He could have been discussing “DarkLeaks.”

Huh?

I first learned about DarkLeaks through Hacker News. Think of it as a 24/7 auction for secrets that could belong to anyone or anything.

Facebook’s quarterly earning are secret before they’re announced. The formula for Coke is kept under lock and key. So is bad behavior if and when it exists inside corporations. (That’s why the government pays whistleblowers a bounty for outing the rot.)

Anybody know where Jimmy Hoffa is?

What if all this information could be purchased on the Internet? What if buyers and sellers could be unknown to each other…and, for the most part, unknown to the rest of the world?

What if…this capability exists now?

You know something. You offer for it sale. You disappear and never look back. Nobody knows it’s you.

DarkLeaks is file-sharing software that lives on the computer of anybody who downloads the program. I’d like to call it the eBay of secrets but that would imply there’s a website with somebody in control.

No. It doesn’t work that way.

DarkLeaks is built on the back of Bitcoin’s blockchain—a massive network of computers all talking to each other over the web. There is no web operator, which can be shut down. If you leak, DarkLeak that is, you get paid in bitcoin.

I’m not a coder. Don’t understand all the nuances. But as a modest user of blockchain technology, I know it works flawlessly. I own a tiny, tiny position in bitcoin and can transfer money anywhere in the world in about ten minutes.

No fee to me. No fee to the recipient. It’s disruptive.

As a consequence, I have every confidence that DarkLeaks works in a similarly flawless fashion. The DarkLeaks developer was also part of the original Bitcoin development team. And because the software is open source, legions of coders around the world can fix any problems that might arise.

Bottom line: DarkLeaks is the real deal.

Yes, it might out bad behavior. Whistleblowers sometimes lead miserable lives after doing the right thing. But there’s no need to worry if nobody knows your name.

Yes, it might promote bad behavior. I suspect it will be nearly impossible to prosecute insider-trading cases when DarkLeaks is the exchange. Again, there’s no need to worry if nobody knows your name.

That may be so, but sometimes certain secrets are so great that when shared people don’t want to believe them, especially if it affects their world-view directly, thrashing it. A quote from Samuel Sanders:
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, is sown thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie told well is immortal.
—Mark Twain

Is DarkLeaks a force for good or evil? It seems like a good thing to me, but on the other hand, if I am really annoyed at someone who has done something unfair to me (which people do far too often to each other) I can name them on DarkLeaks as being guilty of something, right? Who would know it’s not true? That’s the first thing that occurred to me as problematic with DarkLeaks.

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Norb Vonnegut

The New York Times describes my novels as “money porn,” “a red-hot franchise,” and “glittery thrillers about fiscal malfeasance.” Through fiction I explore the dark side of money and the motivations of those who have it, want more, and will steamroll anybody who gets in their way.